The Attempt to Escape to Britain from Bordeaux–Mérignac Airport

The Attempt to Escape to Britain from Bordeaux–Mérignac Airport is a remembered episode from the day France fell: a group of sergeants prepared to fly to England rather than submit to defeat, but the Den-55 crashed while the narrator was away from the hangar. The departure’s sudden interruption binds a failed escape to a personal catastrophe, and the narrator later treats that first loss as the beginning of an emptiness populated by the comrades who did not return.

Background and Stakes

The attempt took place amid the collapse of France’s military resistance. The narrator and his companions were far from the front and had not yet fought, but they were young, frustrated, and unwilling to have defeat define them. Loaded revolvers at their belts served less as weapons than as outward signs of anger and helplessness. Their planned flight to England gave their refusal a concrete form: they intended to continue the struggle rather than remain in a defeated country.

The narrator’s attachment to France had been shaped well before this crisis. His mother had taught him to see the country through stories, patriotic images, and a child’s imaginative play, making France a kind of fairy tale before he encountered its contradictory reality. He had trusted the French Army and its revered leaders, in part because his mother’s assurances had shielded him from doubts about the country’s history and security. At Bordeaux, that inherited ideal met the defeat itself: the loss of France was inseparable, in his thoughts, from the fear that he might never see his mother again.

That attachment was not the same as an uncomplicated acceptance by French institutions. Earlier, the narrator had been told that his recent naturalization and Russian birth disqualified him from becoming a flying officer under a rule concerning nationality. The blow eventually made him feel more, not less, French: it forced him to recognize that French people could be unjust and ridiculous as well as admirable, and that belonging meant choosing among the country’s many faces rather than trusting a flag without question. The planned departure thus occurs within a tension between a powerful emotional allegiance and the exclusions he had experienced.

The Planned Departure

The narrator waited beside the hangar as a Den-55 was being warmed up for the flight to England. He sat with his back against the wall, thinking of the silk pajamas left in his room in Bordeaux—a loss he tried to hold in the foreground alongside the greater losses of France and, perhaps, his mother. Three fellow sergeants were with him. Their revolvers and controlled expressions helped them adopt the bearing of men who would not accept defeat, even though none had yet been in combat.

The narrator recalls that one companion made the group’s theatrical defiance sound painfully clear: their posture resembled a world in which France’s tragic writers had been prevented from writing, only for the country later to claim it had no tragic poets. The scene’s bravado does not erase their powerlessness; it exposes it. They could prepare to leave and signal their refusal, but they could not undo the collapse that had made the flight necessary.

The pilot and two companions boarded first. The narrator struggled with his parachute belt, fixed it, and had one foot on the ladder when an airman cycled up to say that he was urgently wanted at the control tower because of a telephone message. The narrator did not know who had called. Nevertheless, amid the breakdown of roads, communications, and military organization, he felt certain that the voice trying to reach him was his mother’s. He had previously tried to reassure her during the crisis by invoking the military leaders whose names she had relied on in difficult times, but strict telephone regulations had prevented a private conversation then.

The Crash and Its Immediate Consequence

The narrator told the pilot to make the trial circuit without him and to collect him at the hangar afterward. He borrowed the corporal’s bicycle and rode toward the control tower. Only a short distance away, he stopped and looked back at the aircraft. The Den-55 had lifted roughly sixty feet into the air; it appeared to hang there, then rose sharply, tipped to one side, plunged to the ground, and exploded.

The crash transformed a postponed boarding into an abrupt separation from his companions. The narrator watched the smoke for a moment and recognized in the loss the beginning of a recurring wartime experience: the sudden loneliness brought by each comrade’s death. He later associated that accumulating grief with the emptiness he carried in his face and in his life. The episode’s crucial reversal is therefore stark: the phone message pulls him away from a flight he was about to join, and the plane goes down before he can return to it.

Memory, Comradeship, and Aftermath

The narrator gives this first loss a significance that extends beyond the immediate scene. Over four years of fighting, he says, more than a hundred comrades were lost, and only five members of his squadron remained alive. Their absence did not become an empty abstraction. He describes it as a densely populated place, made up of friendships whose names, laughter, and voices may fade but whose presence continues to shape how he experiences later companionship.

That pattern also informs his postwar search for company. He gravitates toward open spaces—the sky, the ocean, the beach at Big Sur—and tries to fill the void with animals, books, and new relationships. Encounters with animals can awaken a hopeful, almost childlike wish for friendship, but the wish remains shadowed by the comrades who are no longer there. The crash at Bordeaux–Mérignac is thus remembered not only as a failed escape but as the first instance of a loss that would structure his later understanding of friendship and solitude.

The scene also revises the narrator’s relationship with France. The country he had once received through his mother’s stories is no longer only a patriotic ideal; it is a nation capable of defeat, injustice, and contradiction, yet still one to which he feels bound. His eventual sense of assimilation does not depend on France proving itself perfect. Instead, the experience of its flaws helps him see its people as human and various, and his allegiance becomes a matter of discernment rather than unquestioning faith. In the remembered departure, attachment to his mother, refusal of defeat, and the loss of comrades converge, giving the failed flight a lasting place in his account of what it means to belong.